Author:: [[Gary Weber]] DateFinished:: 5/10/2023 Rating:: 6 Tags:: # Happiness Beyond Thought  ## 🚀The Book in 3 Sentences - Our thoughts are one of the major roadblocks to awakening. - Through practicing a mixture of meditation, breathing techniques, chanting, and yoga, we can learn to go *beyond thought.* - Once we are beyond thought, we can live life truly blissfully as we don't attach ourselves rigidly to every feeling which comes our way. ### 🎨 Impressions - Out of all the spiritual books I read, Happiness Beyond Thought is in the middle of the pack. I find Weber's discussion on thought and how it relates to the self particularly insightful. But I'm missing the discussion on feeling that is talked about in other books like the Untethered soul. - I found the lack of any sections whatsoever incredibly confusing to navigate. It makes it very difficult to skim or summarize afterward. ### 📖Who Should Read It? - People interested in spirituality ### ☘️ How the Book Changed Me - Two things I found particularly valuable from this book: - 1. Thoughts are tools - 2. The self is an illusion. # Summary The book "Happiness Beyond Thought" by Gary Weber explores the concept of awakening and achieving a state of stillness by going *beyond thought*. The author provides insights on how to control the mind through physical postures, breathing exercises, meditation, and chanting. He also emphasizes the importance of surrendering attachment to outcomes and observing the effects of food on emotions and mental activity. Most importantly Weber explains that [[Becoming spiritually awakened means stopping the habit of attachment with the self]]. **He believes the best place to attack this goal is in learning to go beyond thoughts.** [[Thoughts are one of the major roadblocks to enlightenment as they cloud how things really are]]. [[Stilling thoughts comes with simply clinging to them less]] by seeing [[Your thoughts are another tool for survival much like seeing or hearing]]. Sometimes people experience the blissful feelings of going beyond thought when they enter flow and lose consciousness of the self. [[Flow can temper the mind for the a bit, but ultimately restructuring the mind actively is the only way to gain control over it]]. Some of the best practices to temper our thoughts are breathing exercises, meditation, physical postures like yoga, and chanting. However, it's essential while we are doing these practices that we don't fall for [[Spiritual materialism]] which Weber explains is a major roadblock for many people on their spiritual path. Another point that Weber makes is that to make our spiritual path we must not let our body cloud our mind. Our body clouds our mind when we aren't eating healthily, exercising regularly, and sleeping enough. When we aren't getting enough of any of these things, our mind influences us more. To get our body in order he emphasizes that we must see [[Health is individual|health as individual and find a eating, exercise, and sleeping plan that works for us]]. ## Highlights Do not count sensations without thoughts, characterization or classification attached to them. These are the present. If a sensation is followed by recognition, naming, categorization, analysis, memory, and a story or something to be done about it, that’s not NOW. The pure sensation is gone and thought has arrived on the scene with an experiencer, or a doer who is going to do something about it. ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=152)) Most people find that most of their thoughts, perhaps all of them, contain the “I” in some manifestation. This conclusion that virtually all thoughts contain the I is also a surprise. It really is “all about you”. We would like to believe that our thoughts are about everyone else, the world’s problems, the cure for cancer, etc., when it is actually always about us. Even when you do appear to care about someone else, if you look and feel carefully, you will see that it is really about you. ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=182)) The practices described in this book can bring you to a state in which you have an empty mind but with complete and heightened awareness, but without effort. You can discover that far from requiring such extraordinary effort as the sword fighter or Zen meditator in shikan taza, it is your natural state, in fact what you already are. ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=206)) ## New highlights added 02-05-2023 at 8:10 AM You will find that the mind is not an independent entity but just a jumble of random thought streams, and that thought is a tool and a sense much like hearing or seeing. If you internalize this understanding, your thoughts will rise with decreasing frequency and intensity as there are no hooks on them and no one to grab at them. ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=272)) [[Spiritual materialism]].What ([Location 384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=384)) ## New highlights added 03-05-2023 at 9:00 AM Try substituting “Koham? (kho hum)” for “Who am I?”, or “Kutam?” (khu tum) for “Where am I?” for inquiries. For negations, try “Naham ayam” (nah hum ah yum) or “Na aham” (nah ah hum) for “I am not this”. Your intellectual left brain inquiry may be integrated and deepened with the sensing of the right brain triggered by the phonically-active Sanskrit. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=450)) ## New highlights added 06-05-2023 at 10:07 AM F. How can you use chanting to awaken? ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=623)) Using mantras not just as devices to focus and entrain the mind, but instead focusing on that place from which they emerge, and into which they dissolve, can open the door to awakening. In my experience, particularly powerful chants for this approach are Vedic chants, which are often over 3,500 years old and spring from the Vedas, the classical texts of Hinduism. They are relatively simple, have been phonically tuned in Sanskrit to have a great impact on the mind and have stood the test of time. Sanskrit is also powerful as it is one of the root languages for most Western languages, so there is a felt sense of it. However, since Sanskrit is not your native tongue, it induces fewer mental associations and diversions than would chanting in English. Some of these chants have been chanted by millions of people over thousands of years. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=632)) ## New highlights added 07-05-2023 at 7:51 AM A critical, and unique aspect of this approach is that meditative inquiry is not confined to the time you have available to spend sitting still in a meditative posture. The process can continue sixteen (or twenty four) hours a day, seven days a week in whatever you are doing. As you extend the meditation from the defined period of a sitting practice into your daily life, select a daily periodic activity to trigger you to reengage with the question. This reminder, whether it is answering the phone, beginning eating, going to the bathroom, traveling to work, having a cup of tea, every odd numbered hour, etc. will move you back into the depths and immediacy of your inquiry. It is particularly powerful if you use the inquiry as the first thing on waking to establish the tone for the day and the last thing before falling asleep to place it into consciousness so that it will continue during the night. ([Location 760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=760)) Watch for the difference between that knowing of the next step from your deepest self and just window shopping. One of the great pitfalls is to become a dilettante seeker running from workshop to workshop, teacher to teacher, or book to book as the search takes on an addictive quality. As the old metaphor goes, you only have so much time to find water, you can either dig 100 shallow wells or one deep one. You’re more likely to find water with a deep well. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=789)) ## New highlights added 09-05-2023 at 10:16 AM [[A scientific rational for why the I is an illusion]]. Similarly, ([Location 1012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1012)) - Note: This reminds me of how the rules will set you free To solve this problem, the brain creates many modules to carry out certain specific tasks with short, local connections which are much faster and more efficient. The best known example is the two halves of the brain, which have different functional specializations to reduce the need for long connections for all tasks. As our scientists are discovering, there are over fifty different main areas in the human brain, with the neocortex itself probably having over 150 different regions devoted to different functionalities. Just where would the I be in all of these discrete regions? ([Location 1079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1079)) ## New highlights added 11-05-2023 at 7:35 AM [[Health is individual]] If you eat spicy pizza and you become excited and agitated, then that is rajasic for you. If you eat oatmeal and a whole grain bran muffin and feel energized but calm, then that is sattvic for you. General guidelines from a spiritual text or the latest diet craze are much less valuable than your own observations on what effect certain foods have on your emotions, energy and mental activity. ([Location 1137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1137)) If you surrender your attachment to the results of your actions, that will purify your mind and provide a path to liberation. Rather than performing actions focused on achieving something that you want, perform actions as they arise with no attachment to the outcome. Remain open to whatever occurs instead of operating with the sense of you as a doer who will succeed or fail. This will loosen the grip of your mind and open the way to freedom. I give up! I ([Location 1263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1263)) ## New highlights added 11-05-2023 at 8:35 AM [[Flow can temper the mind for the a bit, but ultimately restructuring the mind actively is the only way to gain control over it]]. In the first approach, your mind can be lost temporarily in some activity like rock-climbing, sex, chess, surfing, dancing, playing a video game, watching a movie, etc. It can also be brought about through spiritual practices like chanting, breath control, yoga, rituals, etc. It is also possible to get peak experiences in these activities, which, as we all know, are very seductive. Unfortunately, when the activity stops, the mind quickly reemerges and takes up where it left off. Thoughts come up like “That was great? How can I do that again?” The state is only passing through and will soon demand a repeat performance at an even higher intensity. This is “Not it.” In the second approach, the structure and operation of your mind is permanently changed. The “I” leaves center stage and plays a minor role, much like your senses. There is a permanent stillness with great clarity, energy, and a joyful, peaceful awareness. There is no feeling of there being something missing that could be added to improve it, or of it being possible to remove something to make it better. Thoughts fall away naturally out of lack of interest. ([Location 1336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1336)) ## New highlights added 12-05-2023 at 7:59 AM Surprisingly, you then see that the body, senses, mind, and everything else is within you. I did not expect beforehand that it would be this way, but that is what is. It then occurs that if everything is within you, you must be every thing, so you must be nothing, and everything must be One. ([Location 1443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1443)) Self is not accurately captured in anything that you have already learned, nor will you someday learn that critical piece of information that will clearly and completely be It. No objective knowledge will in any way add to what This is. There is no knowledge that you can acquire that will be the equal of this natural Peace, still and clear. ([Location 1490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1490)) ## New highlights added 13-05-2023 at 9:35 AM A. With physical postures, breathing exercises and meditation, it is possible for most people to reach a state of stillness with few thoughts, if only for a short time. This stillness, although sweet and seductive, is not the end point. If you watch carefully, that stillness can also be produced by satisfying desires, removing unpleasant sensations or situations, or by a peak experience in any activity, whether it is hang gliding, playing chess, rock climbing, dancing, running, painting, sculpting, or whatever your passion, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described in his classic book Flow. Unfortunately, as everyone has observed, that temporary stillness is followed by a relentless return of thoughts. Awakening is different, however, in that the stillness becomes the ever present ground. Thoughts may still occur, but more like a few birds moving easily across the summer sky rather than the typical mental state which is like being in the middle of a huge flock in a migration. The big difference is that the Velcro is gone from the thoughts. You don’t normally get caught by them. ([Location 1767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B5PR9F83&location=1767))